


slowly, this time

by MourningPluto



Series: let's press fast-forward on this big fucked up mess [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Feelings, M/M, pseudo incest again, sappy sappy redrom shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-10
Updated: 2014-03-10
Packaged: 2018-01-15 06:11:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1294375
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MourningPluto/pseuds/MourningPluto
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As far as you're concerned, everything went straight to hell when you started sleeping in his room even when you weren't finished having sex.</p>
            </blockquote>





	slowly, this time

As far as you're concerned, everything went straight to hell when you started sleeping in his room even when you weren't finished having sex. 

It had to be that. You've examined the situation from all angles, all sides – there's nothing else it could be. 

At first it was just because you were too tired to get your “fat ass out of bed”, as Cronus was so fond of saying, half-sarcastically at two in the morning. Too tired is really saying something because there are not a ton of instances when you would choose to sleep on damp sheets over dry ones, with this creepy asshole spooning you, of all things. Too tired is saying a whole hell of a lot, mostly that you don't have any standards anymore. (Of course, that should have been obvious, given the circumstances.) 

But then, one morning in March, you made a choice that would send the both of you spiraling into something dark and fucked up, something twisted and wrong – like a romance novel, like a movie, like that Folger's commercial that makes its way around the internet every December. 

“Can I,” you'd said. His light was still on; your father, downstairs, was in a bubble of alcohol and grief that neither of you dared try to pop. You didn't even finish your sentence. He raised his eyebrow. 

“Can you...?” 

“I was watchin' Salad Fingers and it fucked me up,” you'd explained, too quickly and all at once. You had expected him to turn you away – probably, he hadn't even seen Salad Fingers, or even if he had, wouldn't feel particularly inclined to care. 

Instead, he shocked you. Mostly because he didn't talk, just scooted over slightly and patted the spot next to him. 

“Thanks.” 

When you woke up that next morning, you'd realized that you didn't even mind the way he was, too tightly, holding onto you; arms looped under yours, hands touching your chest. Realizing that you didn't mind was a horror not even surreal internet cartoons could match. 

\- - -

It's not that he suddenly stopped being a douchebag, or anything. That sure didn't happen. You'd have noticed. 

Then again, you notice a lot lately, and to be honest, it's kind of starting to piss you off. 

Cronus doesn't have good side so much as he has non-awful sides, at least to your estimation, but recently you've been noticing that there are a couple of things that deserve a little better than “not-awful”. 

His music taste? Not totally shit. A lot of the stuff he owns is abominable, but see, recently you star ted stealing CDs from his room (among other things, like clothing or hair product or whatever your sticky fingers fuckin' stick to) and you realized you didn't hate all of it. It was...sobering. 

He's caught you doing that before, and it used to be a big thing. He'd call you some kinda freak for stealing his fucking clothes, like a stalker, and you'd call him the biggest douche in the universe for thinking it was really about the clothes, like a narcissist. Both of you were kind of right, you think, looking back on it. 

Now he just leaves CDs on your bed that he thinks you'll like, with sticky notes on them saying to skip to track 12 because it's the most important, or to listen for the bonus track, or whatever. Sometimes there's songs from a lot of different artists and you realize, as your cheeks burn and you put the CD case by your laptop, that you are attributing far too much worth to a fucking mix-tape. 

Anyway, he has other good traits too, you guess, but the music is an easier pill to swallow. 

\- - -

You hate not hating him. Not hating him is taking up a lot of your busy schedule. 

When you used to hate him (and, really, when he used to hate you) it was easier to be around him, in a fucked up sort of way. Mostly because you weren't. You'd be watching TV in the living room, avoiding errant toenail shards, and then he'd show up and suddenly the clock would strike 13-fucking-hundred, on account of how clearly he's got the black death, that must be why you're so eager to avoid his presence. 

Now you watch TV together and you even joke. What's wrong with you? Sometimes you hold hands for hours and don't notice. Worse, you don't move them. 

It's nice.

(No, it's not.) 

Only it is. 

You're a mess.

\- - - 

One night you're reading Reddit in your room when you hear something odd – and you realize immediately that what you're hearing is the lack of music being blasted from the room adjacent to yours. Then, footsteps. Then, the doorknob twisting. 

You think what's gripping your chest is affection. God. Your stomach lurches and you find yourself standing to accommodate the fool who's deigned to breathe your air. 

“You busy?” Cronus asks. You laugh. 

“Yeah, I'm real fuckin' busy, I'm holdin' a PTO meeting at two in the fuckin' morning - “

“You're such a smartass, God,” he snaps, and it almost feels like the first time you two ever did anything, where you grabbed each others' shoulders and wrestled on the bed and ended up kissing harder than either of you (at least, to your estimation) had ever kissed anybody else. Thinking about it makes you blush and you sit back down on your bed, crossed legs, watching him until he closes the door. Force of habit, you figure. 

“Did you need something?” you ask, along with a lot of other small-talk questions that you ask before you end up kissing-then-fucking, the way it goes every time. You're not sure, frankly, why you go through the motions. It is familiar. You do know that much. 

“Can't I just come in to fucking chat, you little shit?” 

“At two in the morning.”

“You make it sound like such a booty call. Is that what you want?” The way he takes your words and turns them around – makes them into things you hate, things you've said you hate, things you know you've said you hate. God, the way he does that is infuriating. He's a manipulative asshole. 

“I don't know what I want.” Your posture and facial expression are suitably despondent; shoulders slumped, arms crossed, eyes rolling. You are also a manipulative asshole. 

He sits next to you, the way he always does, and puts his hand on your shoulder, the way he always does. 

“Well, maybe you should make up your mind, champ.”

No shit. 

\- - -

It's not only nighttime that you're intimate; no, not even during waking hours are you safe. One afternoon Cronus confided in you too-casually that occasionally you were the topic of some of his songs – y'know, the ones he wrote, and stuff. 

The thing about musicians is that really they're writers, the ones who compose at least, and they tell you all kinds of shit about yourself that you didn't know. You didn't know that you had cities in your eyes or coldness in your touch, and you didn't know that the dumb streak in your hair was not purple but heliotrope, and you didn't know that the way you chewed your nails was obvious enough to warrant mention in a goddamn l- 

No. 

It is not a love song. It can't be. 

You didn't know that you could make people feel strange and weightless and hideous and burning, or that you could give them chills, or that you could give them hope. “Hope for what,” you'd asked, and he'd shrugged, and moved onto the next one. There were eleven, in total. You sat on his carpet and watched his fingers while he strummed and his lips while he sang. It was hard to take in. You still aren't sure it really happened. 

\- - -

You are sitting in his lap, thighs on either side of his legs. It doesn't feel as foreign as it used to; in fact, it's not even wholly sexual anymore, which is even weirder than the other shit you do. 

He's gotten better at kissing, you'll give him that, and you actually look forward to it or think about it sometimes. You'd never tell him, but sometimes you feel like you understand all the fruity garbage he wrote about in those songs. 

You used to question why anyone would have sex listening to music, but now it's all either of you do. You're currently splitting a pair of cheapo iPod headphones, plugged into his phone. Your left ear; his right. He squeezes a handful of your ass in time with the fucking song, which is about the most obnoxious thing ever. You almost laugh. But you don't. 

The singer crooning in your ear says he'll never die, and kissing Cronus makes it feel like you won't, in this weird sort of way that gives you the most delightful chills. 

\- - -

He doesn't have his friends-who-are-girls over as much anymore, which you hate to admit is something a relief. Most of them don't like you anyway; you're Eridan, you're a junior, you're his little kid-stepbrother who still worries about the ACT like an asshole or something. 

Actually, you don't think they dislike you, because that would imply acknowledgment, but still. 

You've never asked why they don't hang out with him anymore, or why he's stopped having them over, or whatever. 

But you are still here, so who's the real fucking winner? 

\- - - 

“You're gonna miss me,” he taunts, right in your ear, while you're having the good decency to sit on top of him when you could be, more practically, in a chair or something. 

“Fuck you,” you say back, because it's embarrassing that he's graduating and he's leaving and that you even care. 

Colleges have been circling for months, sending brightly colored brochures with the names of universities you've never heard of, in places like Oklahoma and Massachusetts and South Dakota. Whoever heard of hauling ass all the way to South Dakota? Aren't there decent colleges locally? You know it's not your life – maybe the best music program in the world is at some buttfuck nowhere college – but you still feel like it's all a little unnecessary. 

“C'mon,” he says, cajoling, or at least his idea of cajoling, “don't be such a baby. There's always Skype.” 

“You hate Skype.” 

“I hate lots of things,” he says, squeezing your ass again, “but I'd still make a fucking Skype account if it came down to it. Don't assume.” 

You have to admit, you're a little bit touched. 

“I'll miss you,” you decide to admit. “But you aren't gone yet. It's only April. Honestly.” 

“Lucky you.” 

“Lucky you.” 

You aren't in the frequent practice of leaving big obnoxious kissing marks on his neck anymore, which is what you figure will make it extra surprising as you lean in and do that exactly. 

\- - - 

He was going to find the brochures hidden in your closet eventually. You just wish he hadn't hugged you after; what a sneaky piece of shit, trying to make you feel bad like that. 

\- - - 

It's funny how you don't fuck this time, even though you'd both expected to. You end up talking instead, which makes you feel a lot more vulnerable than if you'd just had sex. Showing someone your dick is one thing; you're showing him your fucking soul, or something like that. 

But it's nice. Really, it's nice. You're laying on his chest like it's natural or something, as if people wouldn't flip their total fucking shit if they found you together like that, as if you were actually meant to be together or something. (You don't believe in soulmates, for obvious reasons.) 

“I'm scared about college,” he says, out of nowhere. You swallow. 

“Me too.” 

 

Then it stops being about college as you realize that you're not sure how the fuck you're meant to anchor yourself when you've been in such a sorry state for the past half-a-year – that you're not sure how you're meant to function when you're so used to maneuvering around someone so magnanimous and completely unignorable. He's become a necessity – a part of existence that you have a hard time trying to sever. It'd be like chopping off your arm. 

You hear an errant car outside (your earbud's fallen out) and, on the other side, his pulse. 

Naturally you aren't a songwriter, and you can't poetically dance around your feelings the way others are capable of. You couldn't compose a song if you had to, let alone eleven, all of them kind of broadly hinting at the same general idea. 

“I don't hate you, you know,” you tell him, before realizing how fucking stupid that is. His chest shakes as he laughs. 

“Thanks. That's fucking great. I don't hate you either – I mean, I thought that was pretty obvious, and I didn't know we were at the point where that was a thing we had to announce, but if that's what you feel like you have to -” 

“God, shut up! You're still a douchebag, you know that?”

“And you're still bangable.” 

“Wow.” You're laughing too; both of you lay like that, shaking as you laugh, holding each other. 

Tonight is not the night you say that you love him. Your head hurts and you love him, but you don't say so, because you have time for that, damn it. 

You fall asleep, not unaware that hating someone is a hell of a lot easier than loving them, that's for damn sure.

**Author's Note:**

> in which i write a psuedo-sequel to a perfectly fine standalone piece that didn't need any messy feelings complicating the fucking 
> 
> this is dedicated to lilly, who made me love these fucking fools as sappy bastards


End file.
